Parenthetical Girls' most recent lineup (L-R): Amber W. Smith, Zac Pennington, Paul Alcott

Parenthetical Girls is an experimental pop band formed in Everett, WA in 2003 by relative non-musician Zac Pennington. Over a career spanning more than ten years, Pennington has impressively expanded his musical breadth, in large part thanks to the talents of a rotating cast of supporting musicians, marrying his heavily stylized lyrics to lush, fully-orchestrated instrumental backdrops. Whether organic or electronic, intricately produced or charmingly lo-fi, Parenthetical Girls' music explores opposing dichotomies, often juxtaposing disturbing or confrontational subject matter against quirky and bright pop melodies. It is a delicate balancing act pulled off with easy swagger by Pennington, whose androgynous voice and theatrical persona remain always at the forefront.

On a personal level, this band just means a whole lot more to me than most. For a while, I don't think I went a single day without playing one of their songs. For me, they hit all of the right musical buttons, and I never get tired of their music, despite having played the hell out of just about everything they've recorded. So forgive me if this becomes exceedingly long and fawning (spoiler alert: it does). I've just never had the chance to write about them much before, and I really, really want people to listen because I low-key think they're the best band in the world.

(((GRRRLS))), 2004

The first official Parenthetical Girls release appeared in 2004. A modest lo-fi affair, ((GRRRLS)) consists of seven tracks, each mixed on the "O" side by Jherek Bischoff and on the "X" side by Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart. To me, the album is rather middling in comparison to later releases, and I've never invested much effort into differentiating the two mixes, but it's an important encapsulation of the band's early days. Pennington's voice, as both a lyricist and performer, is still in its inchoate stages, rough and uncertain but endearing, even as it's often overpowered by the muddy chaos underpinning it.


"Here's to Forgetting" and "Of Collateral Damage (and Other Loose Ends)" are jangling noise pop, with layers of clashing instrumentation - horns, keyboard, glockenspiel, cymbals - contrasting Pennington's heartfelt delivery. Occasional female backing vocals contribute a sweetness that tempers the cynicism-drenched lyrics. The album's closer, "Love Connection," introduces themes of gender, sexuality, and violence (which are explored more thoroughly on the band's next release) through an ambiguous narrative. Equal parts unsettling ("Woke up at dawn, face down on the lawn") and tender ("Pressed cheek to cheek, fingers underneath, soft impressions of your teeth"), it could just as easily describe a clandestine love affair as a traumatizing assault, a distinction made even blurrier by the ominously insistent final declaration, "Some things are best left unsaid."

Safe as Houses, 2006

Pennington's lyrics further flirt with the fine line between beauty and ugliness on 2006's Safe as Houses. Its first half is told through the perspective of a woman ruined by unplanned pregnancy, miscarriage, and, finally, the unexpected suicide of her daughter. Midway through, the narrative voice shifts to her surviving daughter, hounded by feelings of guilt and inadequacy. Along the way, it tackles issues of body dysmorphia, depression, and the burden of gendered expectations. While I wouldn't trust just any man to handle such material with care, Pennington is known for his frequent transgressions from gender norms, which means that his own experiences, though hardly comparable, lend him clear empathy for his protagonists.


"Love Connection, Pt. II" presents an alternate perspective on the original "Love Connection," and this time there's no mistaking the violence. With unflinching directness, Pennington sings in a wail that sounds not like a man or a woman but more like a wounded animal, "There's blood between my legs, and in the grass outside your house, I came." The atmosphere is made even more unsettling by the twinkly glockenspiel and gently lilting melodies, culminating in the uneasy revelation, "In trying times, I go down without a fight." Left pregnant by the encounter, the narrator unravels her emotional and physical turmoil in the following tracks: "He swelled inside me, and it took nine months to destroy my body."


Years later, she suffers new trauma when her daughter, at the same age that her mother gave birth to her, commits suicide via train. This incident is recounted in painfully vivid detail in "The Weight She Fell Under," gut-wrenching imagery ("When they pulled you from the tracks, your body splayed and split, your chest flushed bright as it was in life") underpinned by militaristic drums and Pennington's raw delivery. As her surviving sister attempts to process both the loss of her sibling and the grief of her mother, she tenderly dissects her loneliness in "Forward to Forget" and, finally, wrestles with her sense that she should have died in her sister's place in the gospel-tinged "Stolen Children."

Entanglements, 2008

Illustrating remarkable growth, both in confidence and skill, Entanglements is about as perfect as an album can get. Now a four-piece band, Parenthetical Girls is further accompanied by a full orchestra for a gorgeous thirty-minute song suite arranged by Jherek Bischoff, Matt Carlson, and Sam Mickens. For being so succinct, it packs a huge punch, each song a deliciously bite-sized pop symphony. Like Safe as Houses, it tackles uncomfortable themes (male privilege, sexual trauma, lost innocence, hebephilia) through an album-length narrative, this time centering on a twenty-five-year-old predator who has rationalized his obsession with a teenage girl as a romance for the ages. Pennington's lyrics are so lushly poetic that they verge on ridiculous, which is the point, representative as they are of a reprehensible man brought to ruin by his lack of moral codes and delusions of grandeur.

Entanglements-era Parenthetical Girls (L-R): Eddy Crichton, Rachael Jensen, Zac Pennington, Matt Carlson

From the breathless and ornate opener "Four Words," which demonstrates Pennington's massively improved vocal range and control, to the cinematic closing ballad "This Regrettable End," which features the amazing-out-of-context/creepy-in-context image of "fresh-stretched post-fuck flesh," every minute of Entanglements is enthralling. The Brecht-meets-Brill-Building pop of "A Song for Ellie Greenwich" is an immediate standout. Deceptively wrapped in bright, whimsical packaging, the lyrics contrast the narrator's paranoid justification of the relationship ("For lack of the words, we call this 'love'/But now they've cynical slurs to define what it was that we have done") against the very real consequences for his victim ("The tone that she chose shows Mother knows what's become of us/And should I start to show, well, heaven knows we'll soon be sussed").


My sleeper favorite, though, is probably "The Former." Several years on, the narrator is still pitifully obsessed, even as his former conquest marries another man. Over swelling strings, measured piano, and fluttering woodwinds, Pennington's voice rises and falls emotively upon misguided declarations: "As you kneel before him, love (through hopes, through harms I've dealt you)/With spent affections on your tongue (through borrowed arms you've clung to)." It's followed by a gorgeously lush cover of "Windmills of Your Mind," performed as a duet between Pennington and Rachael Jensen.

Privilege, 2010-2012

Privilege is the delightfully indulgent culmination of Parenthetical Girls' creative progression, a two-year, five-EP series that was then turned into an abridged twelve-track album released in 2013. (Sidenote: the entire collection is unfortunately not available on Spotify but can be streamed and purchased on Bandcamp.) The project finds the band trying on a multitude of styles to remarkable success. The end result is a 21-song collection that is as wildly varied as it is consistently high-quality. Despite its sonic variation, there is a sense of cohesion cultivated by the lyrics, which always cycle their way back around to exposing, for better or worse, some sort of privilege either participated in or observed by the songs' shifting narrators.

Each Privilege cover depicts a different Parenthetical Girls member and was hand-numbered in that member's blood.

On Death & Endearments centers on themes of celebrity, egotism, and infamy and molds whimsical baroque pop to fit a more electronic framework. In the title track, Pennington's wicked croon is juxtaposed against shimmering synths, blazing guitar, and processed background vocals, embodying a narrator desperate to cleanse his sins from history's memory before he dies: "For their sake, let me stay ostensibly the saint I seem to be/For now, my nose is clean, so bury these peculiarities with me." The Past, Imperfect, full of surprising melodic twists, returns woodwinds, strings, and brass to the mix. The coyly seductive "Weaknesses" transitions from a cinematic orchestral opening to a brash and sensual exercise in vocal prowess, culminating in the sultry command, "Guide these hallowed hips of mine inside those equine thighs."


At the opposite end of the spectrum, Mend & Make Do's "Careful Who You Dance With" is pounding, glittery dance floor pop but also a treatise on homophobic violence, brimming with terse fatalism ("Be careful who you dance with/Somebody's bound to get his head kicked in . . . He knows what he did, and the lads left him lifeless"). Sympathy for Spastics, highlights another killer title track. Displaying Pennington's flair for black humor and clever wordplay, it sticks ridiculous one-liners ("She's thick as shit and pregnant with the myth of a noble proletariat") into a tender piano ballad and totally gets away with it. The series ends with Portrait of a Reputation, which deftly blends the disparate influences of the previous EPs into a satisfying whole. The icy, dispassionate "Curtains" serves as a fitting swan song. Pennington is subtly overtaken by Amber W. Smith, who asks with angelic hush, "Who paid for the privilege and who fell to pieces?" The answer, fittingly: "Let it go."

Zac Pennington

But there's still so much more to discover. For one thing, the band does a mean cover. In fact, their inventive take on the Smiths' "Handsome Devil" is unequivocally better than the original, a clanking and clanging cacophony of sound that's as scary as it is sexy thanks to Pennington's growling, stuttering, howling delivery. They've also done Tori Amos and Kate Bush covers that are equal parts bizarre and brilliant.


Meanwhile, their fascination with Christmas music pales only in comparison to Sufjan Stevens'. Although their original holiday tunes are good enough to listen to year-round, my favorite is another cover, this time of Sparks' "Thank God It's Not Christmas." The tongue-in-cheek lyrics match so well with Pennington's dramatically snobby delivery that they could easily be mistaken for his own.


Finally, Zac Pennington has contributed his vocals and lyrics to work by other musicians like Los Campesinos!, Gigi, Jason Webley, and Jherek Bischoff. "Young & Lovely," from Bischoff's 2012 album, Composed, is a sumptuous duet with French artist Soko that falls right in line with Privilege thematically while bearing richer, more complex orchestral arrangements.


The future of Parenthetical Girls is uncertain. They've been pretty quiet since Privilege, which ended in a way that could be interpreted as much as a final farewell as a temporary one. Pennington's been more present in the worlds of performance art and musical theater lately, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed he'll return to pop songwriting sooner rather than later, even if it's no longer under the Parenthetical Girls banner.